I’m often asked why I do what I do. It’s simple really.
In the late 1990’s I was an early adopter of Extreme Programming while working at Lucent. I was in a leadership role, leading software development and test teams, and it seemed to me to be an interesting way of effectively building software.
I had struggled with Waterfall approaches for years. I’d even worked hard at refining my estimation processes. But my projects were inevitably challenged and many failed to meet critical criteria. That is – projects that met all aspects of our stakeholder expectations.
When I stumbled on XP, it just…resonated with my experience. It also resonated with my leadership style and beliefs that PEOPLE were the central success proposition in software efforts.
Not: risk plans, test plans, project plans, management spreadsheets, cost accounting, estimates, system requirement specifications, metrics, status reports, etc.
Richard Khor is a young ScrumMaster who works with my buddy Josh Anderson over at Dude Solutions.
Josh has been there for a couple of years and is building some kick-butt agile teams leveraging the Spotify models. I’ve been doing a podcast called the Meta-cast with Josh for over 5 years and we’ve talked about everything we can think of around agile software development.
But enough about Josh and I.
In recent Meta-casts we’ve talked about Richard and the example he’s setting as a ScrumMaster. You see Richard is “becoming” a great ScrumMaster, not only by training, but also by his mindset, instincts, and actions. He’s also show initiative in the local agile community by leading a ScrumMaster Focus Group meeting for our local ALN chapter.
I teach quite a few teams about User Stories. Most struggle with the concept, at least initially. One of the key challenges for many is the notion that stories are iterative. That you visit and refine them often, instead of the “once and done” view that we have for traditional software requirements.
Part of that revisiting is reinforcing the collaborative nature of the stories. The nature that says they are “intentionally incomplete” in order to encourage conversations around the story. Remember the 3’C’s from Ron Jeffries: Card-Confirmation-Conversation, with conversation being the most important ‘C’?
I thought it might be helpful to go through a life-cycle example of how stories morph and change as they approach an execution-ready state. So here goes a somewhat contrived example—
The user story has nearly become the ubiquitous requirements artifact in agile contexts. So much has been written about the user stories, their format, how to write them, the associated acceptance tests, and more.
As for acceptance tests, we’ve moved beyond writing them to articulating them as “executable tests” in tools such as Cucumber and Robot Framework.
All of this evolution has been great, as is the focus on the collaborative aspects of the user story.
But I’m starting to see something troubling in my coaching travels. I think we might be focusing too much on the user story as an agile requirement artifact. Instead, we should be taking a step back and considering the user story as a much simpler communication device.
That is simply as STORY, and much less as a written story, but more so as a story that is told…face-to-face.
My motivation for this article isn’t to slam or denigrate any of the scaling frameworks (and those that continue to emerge). Full disclosure, I’m a SAFE SPC and I find significant value in leveraging “some” framework for agile at scale.
That being said, I have a great concern that I want to share. I think we’re losing some of the original thinking and approaches from early instances of agile. The methods grew out of small teams doing big things.
But as we’ve gone forward and introduced agility into larger instances (enterprises, large-scale companies, distributed projects, etc.), I’m afraid that we’re losing the very essence of agility that made it attractive in the first place. Things like:
- Small teams
- Simple, focused solutions
- Just enough
- Face-to-face collaboration
- Working code
- High value delivery
If you’re unfamiliar with the phenomenon, we’re in the middle of conference season right now in the US. Quite a few software and testing centric conferences are scheduled every year in late spring and early summer and then fall. Two times a year, I’m on the road for 4-6 weeks attending and sharing at wide variety of conferences.
It’s something that I enjoy doing although the travel can be quite tiring. One of the great things about it is that it provides me with new ideas. And if you know me, many of those ideas end up in my writing.
Here are a few…
In late 2014 I ran an open space at the Raleigh Scrum Coaches Retreat with this title. You can read more about that session here.
I then got the opportunity to run the session again at the Phoenix Scrum Gathering in May 2015. The session was well attended with the room full at around 100+ people. So the dynamics were a bit different from the retreat.
Instead of focusing on those bad expressions, I want to instead share some of the new themes I heard in this session.
So I published the book in late January 2015, so just a few months ago. I wanted to share some of the happening around the book.
Sales
Have been incredibly brisk, both in the US and abroad. The first month or so was quite slow. But we’re now starting to see momentum gaining sharply.
There also another trend, folks are buying larger “chunks” of the books in PDF format to help in their organizational agile transformation efforts. We’ve had 4-5 large purchases of copies for just this purpose. We hope to see that trend continue as well.
I was watching ESPN today. It’s spring in North Carolina, early April to be specific, and the Masters golf tournament is scheduled for later this week. So there’s a build up of golf buzz related to it.
I’m not much of a golfer, but even I pay attention to the Masters. It seems to be one of those golf tournaments that have seeped into the fabric of American life. And the Augusta, GA course is incredibly beautiful as well.
But enough of that.
There was an interview today with Bubba Watson. Bubba is a 2-time champion and he won the tournament last year – 2014. Early predictions from the pundits give him a more than reasonable chance to repeat.
As I listened to the interview, I became more and more intrigued with Bubba Watson – the person. And I started to see a correlation between some of his answers and the agile principles and mindset I’ve come to know and love.
I challenged a service organization leader the other day about their agile journey. The firm provides outsourced software development teams – mostly for agile-centric clients. I was asking him about his internal application of agile practices and he asked me the question:
But Bob, when are we “done” with Agile?
From his perspective, his clients were asking for agile aware and literate teams and he was providing them. But he really hadn’t wrapped his head around agility. And he struggled with the notion of adopting agile practices internally.
